PHP Drag & Drop site creator using AJAX is a bust
For the life of me, I’ll never understand why people and companies continue to sell boxed PHP applications. As hokey and corporate-cliché as this sounds, companies should instead be selling relationships. Not software. Especially not boxed PHP software.
So, SQL Fusion has created a “Drag and Drop Site Creator” using PHP and AJAX technologies. This product is aimed at web hosters and could provide their customers with a nice and easy way to create layouts for new web pages using all the whiz-bang stuff that AJAX has to offer. The hope is that a web-based site and page creator would react just like a desktop app like Dreamweaver or FrontPage.
Always interested in the latest and greatest boxed PHP applications, I clicked into the faq and looked at the minimum server specifications:
- A dedicated domain or subdomain.
- A MySQL database.
- PHP 4.3 or higher.
- PHP‘s “register_globals” turned on.
- An Ioncube-ready web server.
- GD2 php extension or Netpbm
Emphasis in the list is mine.
That’s all I need. Now I know this company is a joke and not worth my time or money. Anyone writing new applications for universal use that requires “register_globals” to be on in the year 2005 (almost 2006) is clearly writing insecure PHP applications. register_globals is turned off by default in PHP for a reason. In PHP 6, it’s going to produce a warning if it’s on upon Apache start.
If register_globals needs to be on, then that means this application also probably doesn’t use objects, but instead a slew of functions passing around an infinite number of global variables. This in turn means that it will be a nightmare for SQL Fusion to make updates to the site creator code. Which would make it pointless to pay a monthly support fee.
The other thing that stuck out for me was the Ioncube requirement. Ioncube as near as I know is just another server-side PHP encoding device. This way, your server will be running PHP for the site creator app but you won’t be able to see or change the code yourself.
What are you paying for then? You’re paying for a subscription to SQL Fusion’s clunky and insecure code. And the best part? It’s running on YOUR server.
I think I’ll pass.
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